trafficjam is a project-based collective that unites international artists in an urban environment.
During an intense period of residency each artist creates a video in response to the host city.
The final works will reflect personal perspectives on a wide range of social, cultural and political
issues that the artists have encountered while staying at Lichtenberg Studios in Berlin.
With: Niclas Hallberg, Nung-Hsin Hu, Wait Kit Lam, Nia Pushkarova, Steffi Simmen
Artistic Directors: Kim Dotty Hachmann, Matthias Roth
Herrenreiter
‘Herrenreiter’ were amateur jockeys who did not earn their living from their sport. The horseman monument by the sculptor Willibald Fritsch (1870-1948) at the horse-racing track in Berlin-Karlshorst is dedicated to the memory of 161 of these amateur jockeys who died in service during the First World War. “Unseren Gefallenen Helden (To our fallen heroes)” reads the inscription in German on one of the sides of the stone pedestal. However, most of them were professional soldiers who served in cavalry units in the German Army. It is estimated that 8 million horses died in the First World War, which was the subject of centenary memorial events in 2014. The participants in the video “One minute – one hero”, which was shown on 21 March 2014 in front of the rider’s memorial statue, were passers-by, women, men, children and teenagers whom the artists encouraged to sit, pose or ride on stylised animal figures made of plastic, concrete or papier mâché at shopping centres, playgrounds and other locations in the district of Berlin-Lichtenberg; the participants were asked to enact a historical gesture, to play a hero’s role, to jump around or to hold still in their pose for a minute. The horseman figure on the statue is naked, as too is the horse, which has no saddle between horse and rider and no harnesses either. This was quite common in representative art at the start of the 20th century.
Herrenreiter
Second Circle (Niclas Hallberg)
Remember, Intervention (Matthias Roth)